11 for '11: Eliza Griswold

This month’s installment of our 11 for '11 series of big picture conversations on the issues of our times. Today, we talk with poet and journalist Eliza Griswold, about her book The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. Griswold spend seven years traveling the band of the globe called the 'tenth parallel,' the latitude about ten degrees above the equator where two worlds collide. She visited the mega-cities and remote villages of Central Africa and South Asia, where more than half of the world's 2 billion Christians live along with half of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims. It is here, far from the Middle East, where disputes over ethnicity, land, water, and oil are shrouded in conflicts over faith. Griswold shifts the focus to the Global South, where Muslim and Christian fundamentalism is churning out the foot soldiers and suicide bombers who believe they are embroiled in a clash of civilizations, seeding the geopolitics of the future.

Eliza Griswold will be reading at the meetinghouse in historic Jaffrey Center on Friday evening. Her book, The Tenth Parallel, is now out on paperback.